Customer communications management (CCM) refers to a set of Information Technology (IT) solutions that together provide companies, organizations, and enterprises alike with the ability to advance how they communicate and engage with their customers. A CCM solution (e.g., OpenText™ CCM, available from Open Text, headquartered in Canada) enables an enterprise to communicate with their customers as individuals across multiple channels in a single voice throughout the customer relationship lifecycle.
For example, an employee of the enterprise can use a document template previously approved by the enterprise to design a document (e.g., a letterhead, invoice, correspondence, statement, marketing brochure, etc.). This is an efficient to create a document and ensures automatic compliance with the enterprise's policies, such as including an enterprise logo, an approved disclaimer, etc.
The document can then be mass-produced in a variety of digital and print formats with personalized information (e.g., name, address, etc.) for individual customers and delivered over multichannel communications such as print, fax, email, SMS, social media, and portal publication. A CCM solution thus can include software that can be used to compose, format, personalize, and distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications and improve the customer experience.
Traditionally, a CCM solution is incorporated into an enterprise's IT infrastructure and operates on the premises of the enterprise over the enterprise's private computer network. For example, a CCM server application may be installed on a server machine operating on the enterprise's private computer network behind the firewall that protects the enterprise's private computer network.
In recent years, cloud-based CCM solutions offer enterprises a way to leverage the computational power and storage capability of cloud computing. However, in a cloud-based CCM solution, communication documents are produced in a cloud computing environment (also referred to herein as a “cloud”), outside of an enterprise's private computer network. They cannot be easily delivered using the enterprise's infrastructure without potentially compromising the enterprise's network security.